I just installed Wine in Mandrake 2005 and found the same thing. I wonder if the config file has been replaced.
Is this a source installation of wine that you have or a binary installation...say an rpm in Mandrake or Fedora? What version of Wine?
Do you have other files in that directory...like system.reg and user.reg/userdef.reg files?
What are you trying to install and what directions are you using?